American students unable to differentiate between fake news and real

❝ Stanford researchers assessed students from middle school to college and found they struggled to distinguish ads from articles, neutral sources from biased ones and fake accounts from real ones.

❝ If the children are the future, the future might be very ill-informed.

That’s one implication of a new study from Stanford researchers that evaluated students’ ability to assess information sources and described the results as “dismaying,” “bleak” and “a threat to democracy.”…

❝ Middle school, high school and college students in 12 states were asked to evaluate the information presented in tweets, comments and articles. More than 7,800 student responses were collected.

In exercise after exercise, the researchers were “shocked” — their word, not ours — by how many students failed to effectively evaluate the credibility of that information.

The students displayed a “stunning and dismaying consistency” in their responses, the researchers wrote, getting duped again and again. They weren’t looking for high-level analysis of data but just a “reasonable bar” of, for instance, telling fake accounts from real ones, activist groups from neutral sources and ads from articles.

More than 80 percent of middle schoolers believed that ‘sponsored content’ was a real news story…

RTFA and spoil your weekend. Or not. Maybe you’re not surprised. The details are kind of overwhelming.

Critical analysis and thinking were once regarded and cultivated in our country as an important skill, in part because of it’s role in the democratic process. However it seems that having an ability to make rational decisions has fallen by the wayside, in part perhaps because it’s a major impediment to consumerism, as well as other circumstances in our culture that depend on an ability to emotionally manipulate behavior. See also “Confusion is an authoritarian tool” https://eideard.com/2016/11/21/confusion-is-an-authoritarian-tool/ (thanks Ed)

In an interview that aired last night on CBS’ “60 Minutes, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said he has no problem with President-elect Donald Trump tweeting lies and conspiracy theories, including dangerous allegations of mass voter fraud in the recent presidential election.
“The Speaker of the House,” which aired on Dec. 4, 2016. Video and transcript at http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-paul-ryan-on-partnership-with-donald-trump/
The Oxford Dictionary announced a couple weeks ago that “post-truth” is its 2016 word of the year. According to the dictionary’s website, the word is “an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’ “

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Carl Sagan, “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” (1995) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Donald Trump supporters are calling for a boycott of the upcoming Star Wars film “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” http://qz.com/859462/donald-trump-supporters-are-urging-others-to-dumpstarwars-ahead-of-the-rogue-one-release/ The film, slated for US release on Dec. 16, has come under fire from Trump supporters, some of whom, it seems, have been suckered in by the unstoppable spread of fake news. Jack Posobiec, of the group Citizens for Trump, who describes himself as a “recovering Star Wars fan,” tweeted yesterday that the movie was reshot to include anti-Trump scenes, setting off a Twitterstorm among critics and fans of the franchise.

“A website launched on Wednesday seeks to track Russian-supported propaganda and disinformation on Twitter [in near real-time], part of a growing non-governmental effort to diminish Moscow’s ability to meddle in future elections in the United States and Europe.
The “Hamilton 68” dashboard was built by researchers working with the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan, transatlantic project set up last month to counter Russian disinformation campaigns.
The website, supported by the German Marshall Fund, displays a “near real-time” analysis of English-language tweets from a pool of 600 Twitter accounts that analysts identified as users that spread Russian propaganda.” https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/03/hamilton-68-website-tracks-russian-backed-propaganda-on-twitter/
See also http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/ note “Content Tweeted by Bots and Trolls
Activity from 600 monitored Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations”